John Adams - The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2017

Mr. Hayden swallowed, but he didn’t raise his voice. Mr. Hayden wasn’t much more than a bully, and bullies are generally hollow at heart, I think, terrified that the world won’t bend to their will. My father certainly wasn’t bending. He simply opened the door for Mr. Hayden, who stepped outside. He turned back at the top of the porch steps, seething with humiliation and resentment. His face was white with fury, his fists clenched impotently at his sides.

“I’ll have the police here, Dave,” he said. “I’ll have my daughter home.”

“When they arrive I’ll be sure to show them that bruise on her face,” my father said. “Now get off my porch.”

Mr. Hayden walked down the steps and across the yard without looking back. The police never came, though, which is how Joan ended up spending the weekend with us. Come Monday, the bruise had faded to a dull yellow. You had to look close to know it was there at all, and a little blush took care of that. We walked to school together in the bright October morning, chatting amiably about homework and gossiping about the girls at our lunch table. The question of when she would go home did come up in passing (“Never,” she said, and she never did). The question of Tham did not.

When the bell rang for first period—we’d moved on to “Goblin Market”—Joan merely smiled at him as she slipped into her desk, and I let myself believe that the “boyfriend” nonsense had passed. Come lunch, I learned that I was wrong.

Joan collected her food and bypassed our table without a word. As she marched toward the corner where the aliens ate, the room gradually grew silent. By the time Tham scooted over to make a place for her at his table, the only sound was the occasional clank of a pot in the kitchen—and then even that stopped, as the staff gathered at the serving window, jaws agape. Joan pulled the whole thing off beautifully, I have to give her that. She never let on that she noticed the silence or the eyes upon her. She just smiled up at Tham and began to eat.

When the final bell rang that afternoon and I walked out to the picnic tables, Joan was waiting. So was Tham. We walked home in companionable silence. Tham carried Joan’s books, and shortened his stride periodically so that we could keep up. I half expected to see Johnny’s mutilated car idling at some intersection along the way, but if he was there, he hid himself well.

When we reached the house, Joan offered Tham a glass of my mother’s lemonade—we’d been neighbors and best friends for so long that she’d practically become a sister, helping herself to whatever she wanted (a privilege I was denied at the Haydens’). Tham declined—“Thankth, but I thould go,” he said—and Joan kissed him goodbye right there on the front porch. She was on the front porch, anyway. He stood below, to bring their faces into relative proximity. Then he was gone, striding off down the sidewalk while Joan mopped the alien drool off her face with a kitchen towel. Joan’s mom watched from her kitchen window. My mom watched too. I caught the telltale twitch of the living room curtain from the corner of my eye. But she didn’t say a word when we came in, just smiled and offered us some leftover lemon meringue pie.

Joan and I were puzzling over algebra problems in my room when the phone rang. My mom stuck her head in the door.

“Joan, your mother wants to speak with you.”

“I don’t have anything to say to her.”

“Joan, please, you should—”

Joan looked up. When she spoke she was neither angry nor rude, just matter-of-fact in a way that brooked no argument. “I’m sorry, Mrs. Miller. We don’t have anything to say to each other now. If you want me to leave—”

“Of course I don’t want you to leave. You’re always welcome here, Joan.”

Mom gave me a look of mute appeal. But what could I do?

And then Joan said, “Thank you, Mrs. Miller,” and turned back to her homework.

But she couldn’t stay. We all knew that. Sooner or later—probably sooner—Mr. Hayden really would call the police, and in those days there weren’t a lot of legal avenues open to a sixteen-year-old girl in conflict with her parents—even if that conflict had culminated in physical abuse. There was much to love about 1955, but like our own or any era, it was anything but perfect. My parents really would have welcomed Joan into our home for the long term. I believe that. But the forces arrayed against them were formidable.

That’s what my father said when he came up to my room before dinner.

So I wasn’t entirely surprised when Joan didn’t come back to my house after school the next day. The problem was, she didn’t go home either.

The next day Joan went to Bug Town.

She continued to come to school for a few more days, but she became increasingly distant. She no longer turned in homework, and in class she spent most of her time gazing off into the middle distance, staring at things none of us could see. By the end of the week she was barely speaking at all. But I don’t think I realized how entirely lost to us she had become until I gathered my courage to walk across the lunchroom myself on Friday afternoon. I understood then what strength and courage that must have taken on her part. My footsteps echoed in the silence. I could feel the combined gaze of my peers like a leaden cloak upon my shoulders.

The aliens scooted aside so that I could set my tray down across from her.

“Hi, Joan,” I said.

She looked up at me and smiled, and I recognized the smile. It was her old, familiar, halfway crooked smile. “Hey, Nance,” she said, as she might have said if we’d passed in the hall or she’d picked up the phone to find me on the line. It was that natural and spontaneous, and for a moment, looking at her, I felt like nothing had changed. I think that was the most surprising thing. I expected her to be utterly transformed, tuned to a different wavelength, catching strange. And while there was plenty of that there, she was also just Joan, the Joan I loved and remembered, and I missed her.

“When are you coming home, Joan?”

“I’m not.”

I didn’t want to be rude, so I glanced nervously at the towering alien kids sitting around us, patiently sucking down the school’s indifferent fish sticks and fries, before I leaned forward to whisper, as if they wouldn’t hear, “But Joan, they’re aliens!”

Joan surveyed the lunchroom. She looked at Luke Jackson, the washed-up jock who’d cared more about booze than he’d cared about her. She looked at Jimmy Ford, who, like her father, had been a bit free with his fists. And if Johnny Fabriano had been there, she would have looked at him too, I’m sure. She looked at them both, and then she turned back to me with a Mona Lisa smile and said, “No worries, Nance. I’m used to it.”

I looked down at my own tray of soggy fish sticks and fries. Joan reached out and put her hand over mine where it lay upon the table. “Bug Town is beautiful, Nance,” she said, and a wave of sorrow washed through me. “Come with me,” she said. “We can be free.”

But she was wrong about that. Mostly, anyway.

Johnny showed up at my doorstep Saturday around six. I heard the unmistakable rumble of the Merc’s engine as he pulled up to the curb, and when my father—over my objections—sent me to the door to meet him, I saw the car for myself. It might have been a convertible fresh off the assembly line, that’s how neatly the thing had been done, but the car had been mutilated all the same. Shorn of its roof, with its lavender dash laid bare to the October sky and those ridiculous flames licking at the hood and fenders, it had been exposed as a broken toy, the empty vanity of a man who was more boy than man. He didn’t even measure up to the title Mr. Hayden had ascribed to him. Johnny Fabriano was no cheap hood. No, Johnny Fabriano was a selfish child whose experience of the world didn’t extend much beyond Red’s Billiards Parlor, and as he walked up the sidewalk to meet me, he seemed every bit as maimed as his car, stripped of whatever aura of menace he had once possessed, like a kid playing dress-up in his brother’s leather jacket and motorcycle boots—a kid who hadn’t slept in a week, pale and tired (drawn, my mother would have said), with his trademark duck’s ass in disarray.